Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Friday, February 3, 2017

A few years ago, I watched an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. Among his
guests were comedian Gary Shandling, actor Sean Penn, and former Congressman
Harold Ford Jr. from Tennessee. They were discussing the war in Iraq, and
Shandling suggested that we need to get beyond our “winner consciousness” regarding
the issue of war. Penn seemed interested but remained silent. Harold Ford
appeared mystified by the assertion, but I knew exactly what Shandling was
referring to and have been thinking about it ever since. In short, winning is
an inappropriate metaphor when it comes to war, and we keep having wars
precisely because we haven’t yet figured that out.

Speaking in broad terms, we have, as a
nation, adopted something akin to “sports-think” in our conception of how most
issues should be resolved. Winning has become a default position that stops
further deliberation. There are winners and losers and no in-betweens. At first
glance, the win-lose mentality appears to be a type of simple-mindedness born
of a mediated society in which sound bytes serve in place of serious thought.
But I suspect that something deeper fuels this type of thinking. It stems, in
part, from what I call truth by
association, which is an instinctual and tribal-like loyalty that says, “My
side. Right or wrong makes no difference, but our triumph does matter because
we are, after all, who we are.”

Here, winning asserts the legitimacy of
the association, especially when “our side” prevails. In other words, we
validate the truth of our superiority when we win. On the flip side, losing
becomes personal, and loss implies we have been wronged. Both liberals and
conservatives are guilty of practicing truth by association. What has happened
with the metaphor of winning is similar in some ways to what happened during
the Cold War to the word socialism,
which was stigmatized with such vehemence that even to raise the subject of
economic equity is still, for many people, considered subversive.

The notion of winning, however, took the
opposite direction from the word socialism.
Instead of a negative connation, winning morphed into an aspirational ideal
that is ultimately a dead end. Somewhere in the past century of American
culture, victories in comic books, movies, sporting events, business, games,
lotteries, politics, and the like converged into one all-purpose metaphor:
winning, winning, winning. The coaches who have gone to the furthest extremes
to make the point that nothing is more important than winning are often
celebrated as being great.

This popular internalization of winning
has become part of our collective psyche. The significant emotional experiences
we share tend to drive the metaphor of winning deep within us, and eventually
we perceive that winning reinforces our association without qualification (when
our team wins it is exhilarating), and the metaphor brings us closer together
without need of further discussion. Moreover, most of us will respond to
criticism of these seemingly self-evident truths with a deep-seated
unwillingness to reason or give ground. In other words, in matters of conflict
between our group and another group, the word win is enough to close off the conversation, as in enough said.

Combat experience in war may be the most
extreme example of experiential emotional attachment. Men and women suffering
the stress of war often bond emotionally to such a degree that their
association will thereafter trump issues of right and wrong. I suspect that
people who have not experienced these feelings can barely imagine what it’s
like. A shared significant emotional experience imbues a strong sense of
commitment and kinship. I’s become we’s in combat, and the fortunes of
individuals give way to an emotional sense of camaraderie and attachment to the
outfit. The rigidity of one’s position about the politics at hand during war is
often driven so deep that, for some, reasoning about the issue with complete
objectivity will never again be possible.

Setting aside the instance of war for a
moment, let’s consider an example in civilian life: cases involving criminal
prosecution where people are shown to have been wrongly convicted. When the
convicted party is found innocent by DNA testing and subsequently released from
prison, the prosecutors who won the conviction more often than not continue to
believe the person is guilty. Prosecuting someone involves internalizing the
righteousness of one’s position; facing off against defense attorneys drives
the prosecuting attorneys’ convictions so deep as to sometimes reside beneath
the reach of reason. Enough examples of this exist on television news that one
need not look very far to find them.

Another example is the racial prejudice
that permeated life in the South during the twentieth century. I have
first-hand knowledge of this experience. People of all races who believe
passionately that they are free of racial prejudice will remain convinced that
they are free of such bias in spite of the results of psychological tests that
detect their partiality. Similarly, when profound emotional experience is
internalized as feelings of betrayal, the resentment can last a lifetime. For
example, an urban legend of Jane Fonda “gotcha missives” exist in the form of
emails circulated frequently. These emails tell the story of how she was
valiantly denied service in a steakhouse in Montana by a restaurant owner who
turned out to be a Vietnam veteran still angry about Fonda’s pro-Communist
actions during the war. Revenge brings some people vindictive satisfaction; it
means they are winning, getting even,
making up for having been deceived and betrayed. Better yet, revenge means a
traitor is losing (in Fonda’s case, it was only a steak dinner, but she at
least suffered humiliation). This kind of cultural behavior takes the place of
rational discourse about war and justice. And yet, who could doubt the deeply
felt emotional wounds of veterans who thought—then and now—that Fonda’s actions
betrayed them?

I was a hawk during the Vietnam War.
Although I had already been discharged from a four-year hitch in the Marines, I
almost reenlisted during the Tet Offensive in 1968. What stopped me was the
fact I was single, still owned a home, and could not find anyone to buy it. But
I have come to realize that, without the anti-war protest movement that
recognized senselessness for what it was, we might have lost another 50,000 or
so men and women to a war that, in hindsight, seems absurd. More absurdity
occurs when people start railing about how we should have won in Vietnam. Perhaps winning would have made any future loss of
life worth the effort. But win what?
In an address to the Cato Institute, conservative activist Victor Gold asked
the still-pertinent question that applies to both Vietnam and Iraq: “How do you
win someone else’s civil war?”

A deeper examination of the concept of
winning is critical here. The metaphysics of the idea of winning is so thin
that, when you stop and give it some serious thought, it boggles the mind. One
foot short of the goal, three inches from the cup, a foot from the hoop, a ball
out of the park, or one punch can make all the difference in the world: one
side wins, the other loses. The reactions of the participants and the
spectators are radically different, yet they do not, in any real way, reflect
the physics of what actually happened. Think about it. Nothing in the world is
changed in physical reality except something did or did not happen with or to a
ball. Now one group of people is beside itself with joy, and the other side is
devastated.

How can this same pattern apply to war?
How can winning a game parallel the winning of a war? “America 14, Vietnam 7”
doesn’t work. Consider the number of deaths: 58,000 Americans; 1-3 million
Vietnamese. Bedsides getting closer to reality, does that mean anything? The
more you think about it, the more intangible and bizarre the notion of winning
becomes. Scores and blood do not mix. One can receive a mortal wound and still
have time to kill an enemy, but to say then that either side has won stretches
the metaphor of winning beyond its true meaning. The catastrophic circumstances
exceed our ability to comprehend what it means to lose anything.

Just as the psychic investment of
prosecutors makes it difficult for them to change their opinion about the guilt
of someone they have sent to prison, imagine how the people feel who have lost
family members to a war that others call a mistake. To think that a war in
which a spouse or son or daughter made the ultimate sacrifice was a mistake, is
emotionally untenable, and this adds legitimacy to any war. Vietnam, Iraq,
Afghanistan—the circumstances post sacrifice don’t matter or, to be more
precise, can’t matter without increased pain. The psychological result is that
most people prefer to believe in the honorable sacrifice of their family member
instead of questioning the circumstance of war. Asking hard questions after a
personal loss in wartime results in further heartbreak. When one admits the
illegitimacy of a war, the only alternative is to rethink one’s loyalties;
rebuke one’s truth by association, if necessary; and redirect one’s sense of
outrage at those responsible for the injustice—which makes this kind of action
very unlikely for all but a few.

Does imagining Jane Fonda being humiliated
compensate for the perception that we lost the war? If we were keeping score on
the basis of deaths alone in Vietnam, didn’t we win? Not to mention that we got into the war in Vietnam on false
pretense, by claiming to have been fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin. You see,
truth by association trumps ethics. My
country right or wrong means that our sins are justified and your country’s
are not. It means we don’t need to make amends or apologize because our errors
are beyond reproach. People who assume truth by association believe that
anything they do to prevail is justified by the simple righteous nature of who
they are. And this is why human beings are locked into a feedback loop of
irrationality: hypersensitive to the transgressions of others and oblivious to
our own, we generate the eternal justification for conflict.

President John F. Kennedy said the war was
the Vietnamese people’s to win or lose. But our strategic view at the time was
that if Vietnam fell, a virtual stampede of countries would suddenly embrace
Communism. Then Vietnam did fall, and nothing of the sort occurred. In fact,
the reverse happened. So, we must ask, was the war worth the deaths of nearly
three million people? Vietnam seems to be a thriving country today, one with
which we have resumed business relations, and, to my mind, the situation makes
the frequent laments about having failed to win
even more meaningless. Of course, many would argue that a number of
citizens in Vietnam today feel oppressed by their government, but it is a grand
illusion to assume that, had the South prevailed, there would now be a thriving
American-style democracy in Vietnam. Fast forward to 2010, and we’re confounded
by similar issues in Iraq and Afghanistan, both deeply divided by tribalism?

The conflicts of religious, ideological,
and financial interests being what they were then, and still are, make
establishing a democracy anywhere in the world a very tall order. The ability
to perpetually balance power is very nearly impossible, even in the best of
cases. Our own government is strangled by lobbyists in cahoots with our
representatives, who are so beholden to various special interests that the
majority in America has very limited influence. Yet we are sustained with
centuries of idealistic notions about democracy and the rights of citizens.

The end-run philosophical threshold of
winning at any cost is that it results in a perversion of us and them to such a
degree that torturing prisoners is suddenly deemed okay. The historical records
dating all the way to the Inquisition—suggesting that torture is ineffective
and confessions obtained through torture are dangerously unreliable—don’t seem
to matter. What our recent pro-torture policy achieved is to expose our
servicemen and women all over the world to inhumane treatment by our enemies,
who now feel not only justified but gleeful about the very opportunity and
possibility of being able to torture Americans in the future.

There is a huge metaphysical disconnect
inherent in the metaphor of winning: racking up points on an electronic game
offers an illusion of winning that does not transfer to the realities of war.
The ephemeral consequences of winning in athletics are totally inappropriate
for war. Even winning in sports events, when huge sums of money are involved,
does not qualify as an analogy for combat. War is catastrophic change, writ in
blood. It’s long past time for average Americans to think this conundrum
through, to get beyond the consciousness of winning, as Shandling suggested,
and to quit acting as the cheering section in a culture that behaves as if winning is a currency for endless
incompatible assumptions and analogies.

It’s unfortunate that we can’t discuss
this subject without people getting red-faced and stomping off, mumbling
clichés about patriotism. Such a response demonstrates just how easy it is to
resort to war in the first place. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that we
did not learn from our experience in Vietnam. But the proponents of winning a preemptive war in Iraq may
have once again duped themselves. These same people incessantly champion small
government, yet our bungling in Iraq and Afghanistan has so inspired the
exponential recruitment of our enemies that we may never again be able to
entertain having a small government
with such a big threat facing us.

The yearning for small or limited
government is understandable but only in an idealistic sense. It’s hard to be
against limited government when you see your government as an oppressor. But
what small or limited government really amounts to—in this day and age—is
emasculated government, incapable of protecting citizens from a collusion of corporate
interests whose lobbyists, in effect, purchase legislative support from
politicians. A government that cannot protect the rights of citizens above
those of corporations is not a democracy, nor is it a fair game.

Winning as a metaphor for games is
appropriate, but for war it is insanely inadequate and morally bankrupt.
Winning as a crossover to a war analogy is an anti-intellectual shortcut that
eliminates thought about the very things we should think about. We need a political makeover in America. We need to
understand the concept of winning in all of its manifestations, and we need to
stop being consumers and reclaim our roles as citizens. This, in my view, is
the only way for average citizens to win.